Nancy Campbell sat down with me some months ago to record this video about her work with co-authors JP Olsen and Luke Walden on The Narcotic Farm. I am excited to share it here, as PLoS Blogs is such a relevant place for their work and this interview.

The Narcotic Farm has an excellent website where you can explore more about the farm, the book, and the accompanying documentary that aired on PBS. Here’s a little snippet:

The Narcotic Farm – both the documentary and the book – tells the story of this fascinating institution through rare photographs and film, forgotten press clippings, revealing government documents, and historically significant new interviews with prisoners, doctors, and guards who were there. Through their interviews and a wealth of newly collected archival material, The Narcotic Farm traces this federal institution’s rise and tumultuous fall.

The Addiction Research Center (ARC) in Lexington, Kentucky, was dedicated to elucidating the basic underlying mechanisms of drug addiction. The ARC was housed on the rural campus of a prison-hospital called “Narco,” one of two “narcotics farms” in Lexington, Kentucky, and Fort Worth, Texas.

For its studies on drug effects, the ARC had access to a pool of drug-experienced human subjects drawn from the ranks of convicted felons. Given their unparalleled access to human subjects, the scientists who worked at the ARC made conceptual contributions still acknowledged today.

Based on archival work as well as dozens of oral history interviews with individuals who began their research careers at Lexington, the article presents an analytic, intellectual history of the early work of Abraham Wikler, whose lifelong pursuit of the underlying mechanisms of opiate addiction led him to hypothesize the role of conditioning in relapse, as an exemplar of the kind of scientific research that depended on closely listening to and observing “post-addicts,” as subject participants were called.

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3 comments

addiction is a form of enslavement,,so,,they need additional enslavement to correct their primary enslavement?,,,this is a delusion in itself isn’t it?,,,If someone is a serial killer,,they all go back and research their childhood for precursors ,,and to not even allow that as a redeemable factor in specifically non-violent offenses shows prohibition economics at it’s most methodical tyrannistic fashion doesn’t it?,,lol,,,the harrison act had it correct,,how and why was that forgotten?,,,my case is my study,objective,,factual,,there are human rights violations being handed out on false theories.,,,hello?,,and the time tables of new designer drugs proves my facts also.,,nixon lied to us all.